This is what is wrong with big corporations.

[Titi]

Taco Bell fires Grandma after 30 years.

http://www.startribune.com/coleman/story/1538641.html

I think this was a case of out with old in with new. (and we all know how that normally works out.) The only time she even took off of work was when she was in a serious car accident that took her a year to recover from. Heck she was never even late.

[TheseFightingWords]

It's sad that companies treat employees this way. Hell I'd love to have a person like this working for me. I mean we've had one before. A store I worked at had a guy that was in his 70's and had been there for about 25 years. He knew everyone and everything about the store like the back of his hand. I mean sure he had his drawbacks. He was slower than the younger workers, he couldn't run the cash registers for longer than covering a 15 minute break. But everyone knew him, he was loyal, always willing to help out, caught most of the employees that were stealing, etc. Hell most of the time you could go up to him and ask how many of product x do we have and he'd know pretty much exactly how many.

[ditchdj]

It's not uncommon for restaurant district managers to do this. Happens all the time. I've worked at fast-food restaurants that had managers in tears after the horrible rippings they've gotten. The goals are "lean production" and "continuous improvement". The numbers you produce are NEVER good enough and must increase the next period. It's pretty much a "Productivity At Any Cost" atmosphere. And if they see someone they dont like they'll work on them until they either quit or get written up and fired, no matter how "good or bad" the employee is. That's part of the reason why the Jeep Shooting happened. I've even heard that some high in management get off on it. They get drunk on that kind of power and use it to slap you around, kinda like a cat swatting a mouse around before he finally puts it in his mouth and snaps its neck. And with no union to get in the way that makes it much easier.

[RammsteinGirl]

Wow, that's just terrible. I don't know if you heard, but Kmart did the same thing back in January 2006 to a few thousand of their 25+ year veteran employees. Just called them into the office one day and told them they were gone, no severance pay. Cleaning house of all the full-time old-timers, with their $14 an hour and benefits in favor of hiring all part-timers. I don't understand where this realm of thinking comes from. Sure, it saves them money, but hurts them in the long run. I'm sure all of the full-timers that are left live in fear of being terminated and rightfully so. It takes hiring 20 crappy new employees who don't give a shit to find one quality worker. And you still can't replace 30 years of customer service experience even with a new quality worker.

I think places like Taco Bell and Kmart need unions to prevent this kind of thing from happening. At Kmart they actually show us anti-union videos, talking about how unions hurt the company and etc.

[Rahmota]

Big surprise about that. Companies hate it when they have rank and file loyal employees who deserve to be rewarded and kept as valuable contributors makign more money than the cheap throw away goof foffs they can hire in for about 1/2 or less than why they pay the veterans of the retail wars.

And whos kidding that its only at retail. We live in a throwaway greed is good reward ceos for trashing the economy and society world anymore in america.